The present invention relates to techniques for managing computer systems, and more particularly to techniques for managing storage environments.
With the proliferation of computers and network systems, an increasing amount of information is being stored in electronic form. This has given rise to large and heterogeneous storage environments for storing the information. Due to their heterogeneity and complexity, managing these storage environments is a difficult and complex task.
Several application programs (e.g., enterprise resource management (ERM) applications, storage resource manager (SRM) applications) are presently available for managing storage environments. Many of these use standardized protocols such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) protocol for communicating with the storage environments. However, controlling a storage environment using conventional protocols such as SNMP is a complex endeavor. In order to accomplish even a simple task, the storage management application program typically has to issue multiple SNMP commands to the storage environment. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, in order to add a volume to a storage array 100, an ERM application 102 has to send a series of SNMP commands 104 to the storage array. Even though some commands can be grouped into SNMP PDUs (Protocol Data Units), multiple commands are required and the ERM application has to constantly monitor the results of the commands. As another example, a commonly performed task such as discovering a storage array and getting configuration information for the storage array takes several SNMP commands to accomplish.
Issuing multiple commands and monitoring responses to the multiple commands is difficult and tedious for storage management applications and is very processing-intensive. Further, since SNMP uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) protocol that does not guarantee message delivery, the storage management application has to implement techniques to verify delivery of the SNMP messages to the storage environment and to ensure that responses are not lost. As a result, conventional storage management applications have to implement techniques such as polling loops, techniques for detecting SNMP traps, and other like techniques to ensure that the SNMP command was delivered to the storage environment and to detect responses to the SNMP commands. As a result, conventional storage environment management programs are generally quite complex and difficult to develop.
Additionally, configuration data related to a storage environment is usually stored and represented as a table. For example, information related to each Port of a storage array may be stored as a table row and properties of a Port (e.g., port identifier) are stored in columns of the table. SNMP (version 1) does not support the ability to retrieve values stored in a table in a single operation. As a result, using SNMP (version 1), if a storage management application needs to get information from a table storing information for elements of a storage array and their properties (e.g., information for all ports of a storage array), the application has to issue a separate request for each property of the element and then repeat that for each row of the table. This can be quite tedious and further increases the complexity of the storage management software.
From the above, it can be seen that improved techniques for managing storage environments are desired.